After more than two decades of cleanup at Onondaga Lake, the county is looking to install a beach. Some environmentalists say the water is still not clean enough for the public to swim in.

The Onondaga County Legislature has yet to decide if the plan for the beach will be carried out, said Casey Jordan, chairman of the county’s Environmental Protection Committee. Onondaga County is conducting a $330,000 beach feasibility study, Syracuse.com reported.

Local environmentalists told The Daily Orange that they want the New York State Department of Health to test sediments at the bottom of the lake in the potential beach area before considering the beach plan. Allied Chemical Corp. contaminated the lake’s water and sediment from 1920 to 1985 when toxic chemicals and raw sewage with little to no treatment were dumped into the lake.

The north end of the lake meets standards for safe bacteria amounts, Syracuse.com reported. Lindsay Speer, a member of Neighbors of the Onondaga Nation, said the idea of the beach is an “illusion of safety.”

The public will forget about the rest of the lake’s pollutants if the beach is created, Speer said. Samples taken from the south end of the lake show there are still toxic sediments at the bottom, she said.

The public may think that, because the north end of the lake is qualified for a beach, the south end must be just as clean as well, Speer said.

“My personal concern is that we are setting ourselves up to expose people to those contaminants that are buried underneath,” she said.

The lake does meet water quality standards, said Alma Lowry, counsel to the General Counsel for the Onondaga Nation. The standards only test the water’s surface and consider toxins that cause immediate harm, such as E. coli and phosphorus, she said. They ignore the contaminants at the bottom of the lake that could lead to long-term health risks, such as cancer or long-term respiratory diseases.

“The concern with these long-term problems is that they are things that no one’s ever going to point to and say, ‘I got that from the Onondaga Lake beach,’” she said.

The bottom of the lake contains 26 harmful sediments, including mercury and polychlorinated biphenyl or PCB, said Marianna Kaufman, a physician in Syracuse.

The beach will show the public that the county has cleaned up the sewage, she said. It will not, however, show there are still contaminants at the bottom of the lake, Kaufman said. This could cause a lot of confusion about whether the lake is safe to swim in, she said.

The lake’s contaminants are covered by a cap or a layer of material that acts as a chemical barrier, Speer said. It is uncertain how dependable the cap will be in retaining these toxins and it must be checked every five years. The rate of human exposure depends on how well the county can cover the pollutants, she said.

Fish can also contain a lot of mercury from the bottom of the lake which can lead to coordination, behavioral and mental health issues, Lowry said. Sediments in the beach area should be tested in case they contain similar toxins, she said.

The public needs to be more informed about the possible sediment contaminants, she said. The country has done a highly impressive job with cleaning the lake, but the cleanup is not done, Lowry said.

“Continuing to talk about the lake as clean without the context is only going to make it more difficult to get out the message about advisories, precautions about fish and other activities,” she said.

Published on October 27, 2019 at 10:06 pm

Contact Abby: akweiss@syr.edu | @abbyweiss_21